Two Fayetteville boys went to a movie in 1964. They were never seen again

Nancy McCleary Staff writer @FO_McCleary

Friday

Aug 24, 2018 at 12:01 AMAug 24, 2018 at 10:56 AM

The disappearance of brothers Terry and Alan Westerfield rocked Fayetteville and stumped police. Not a piece of clothing, not a solid witness, no bodies. But investigators have a theory about what really happened to the young boys.

This story is part of our Unsolved: Cape Fear Mystery series. It published on Aug. 8, 2018.

On an unusually hot Saturday afternoon in September 1964, a military police officer dropped off his two young stepsons in downtown Fayetteville, right outside the Broadway Theater on Hay Street. The boys wanted to see a double feature, he would later say.

Around dusk, as storms from a dying hurricane rumbled over Fayetteville, the stepfather said he returned to the theater and waited for the boys to come out.

Fayetteville police, Fort Bragg investigators and dozens of other lawmen searched extensively for the Westerfield boys. They chased tip after tip as rumors about the boys spread over the city. Police searched for cars seen around the Bordeaux neighborhood, where the family lived, and interviewed dozens of people who thought they had seen the boys. They chased leads across several states and brought in the FBI for help.

"We've checked every lead we've had and we're still up against a blank wall," Police Chief L.F. Worrell told an Observer reporter in the days after the disappearance.

Days would turn into weeks, then years.

Investigators would find nothing — not a piece of clothing, not a solid witness, no bodies. Gradually, the shocking story of the missing Westerfield brothers would erode in the back of people's minds until, eventually, it was nearly gone.

Fifty-four years have passed since the disappearance, which is believed to be the oldest such case involving juveniles in the state.

Most of the key people closest to the boys are dead, as are the original investigators. The Broadway Theater was demolished years ago — the site today is the Robert C. Williams Business Center, next door to Pierro’s Italian Bistro.

But not everyone has forgotten Terry and Alan Westerfield. The Fayetteville Police Department still has the file. A cold case task force reopened it in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“We really and truly didn’t have anything to work with,” remembers Alex Thompson, a retired Fayetteville police lieutenant who was part of the task force.

Over the years, generations of detectives had pieced together theories about what they believed may have been the brothers' fate. The boys were probably killed on that hot September day when they disappeared, some believed. And the killer was probably the one person they had suspected all along.

•••

Margie Westerfield Bock had to go to work at a hair salon early that Saturday morning, so she hired a babysitter to look after her two boys at their home on Madison Avenue in Bordeaux, the neighborhood off Owen Drive. She was a single mother to Terry and Alan, divorced from their father and recently separated from her third husband, Carl Bock, a military police officer who was living on Fort Bragg.

After she left for work, Bock went to the house and told babysitter Barbara Temple to leave. She stalled as long as she could before leaving between 12:30 and 1 p.m.

That was about the time that Alan, a 7-year-old who had dark blond hair and a speech impediment, was seen riding his bicycle outside. Another boy from the neighborhood stopped by the house and asked if Terry could come play. Bock told him no, that Terry was being punished.

Bock would later tell investigators that he took the boys to the movies about 4 p.m. “No Name on The Bullet,’’ a Western starring Audie Murphy, was playing at the Broadway, along with “The Atomic Man,’’ a science fiction film.

“By his own admission, he said the boys wanted to go to a double feature and he took them there,” Thompson said. “He doesn’t know why they wanted to go.”

The weather was ominous that evening as the remnants of Hurricane Dora moved through, dumping more than 2 inches of rain overnight.

Margie came home about 5:30 and found Bock at the house. They argued about Bock sending the babysitter home and him taking the boys to the movies.

She changed clothes and went out for the evening to the NCO Club on Pope Air Force Base, something she had been doing frequently, Thompson said.

Bock told police he returned to the Broadway about 7:45 p.m., parked and waited for the boys. They were supposed to meet him at the corner. He said he stayed until 9:30 p.m. and left.

“At what time did he ever get out of his vehicle?” Thompson said. “The employees at the theater will tell you they were not approached or asked about them.”

The theater workers knew the boys, who were frequent customers and made trips to the concession stand. They told police the boys weren’t at the theater that night.

When Bock left downtown, he traveled to Fort Bragg and then returned to the Westerfield house to wait for Margie.

When she got home from the club about 1 a.m., the two again argued about the boys and the events that had occurred that day.

Bock questioned whether Margie had picked up her sons, pressing her on the issue.

“He keeps stressing that he dropped them off at the movies,” Thompson said.

At 2 a.m., Margie had heard enough. She called the police and told them that her sons were missing.

•••

Things were complicated for Margie, who got married young and would find herself caught between the boys' biological father and her third husband Bock.

Thompson discovered the strained relationships when he began looking into the case and after talking with Margie before her death.

Margie was 18 when she first met Bock, who was 10 years older, in the Fort Bragg Post Exchange where she worked at the time.

Bock, whose family emigrated to the United States from Germany when he was a boy, had enlisted in the Army in 1945. Early in his military service, he was charged with a crime, Thompson said.

“I want to say it was robbery or assault, but regardless, he was sentenced and served time in Leavenworth,” the federal prison in Kansas.

Bock was given the choice of serving his sentence or returning to active duty, Thompson said. He was released from prison, made a military police officer and eventually assigned to a unit at Fort Bragg.

Although she found him to be a “gentleman,” Thompson said, Margie regarded Bock as more of a brother than a boyfriend.

Shortly afterward, she met Thomas “Mel” Westerfield, also a soldier. The two began dating, often riding to Rockingham to visit Margie’s mother.

That changed when Margie borrowed Bock's camera and took photos of her and Westerfield. She returned the camera but forgot to take out the film. Bock had it processed and discovered that Margie and Westerfield were a couple.

“I think the word today is ‘busted,’” Thompson said.

Margie maintained both relationships, dating Westerfield and her “brotherly” friendship with Bock, thinking he had no interest in her.

But Bock slipped away to New York City for a vacation and returned with an engagement ring that he presented to Margie. She accepted the ring, even though she continued to date Westerfield.

The Army re-assigned Bock shortly afterward.

“She didn’t have any idea where he transferred to,” Thompson said, “but he wrote her and the letters would come to her mother’s Rockingham address. Her mother would read the letters and discard them.”

Margie, who still had the engagement ring, had also given the address to Westerfield. He also sent letters, which were passed along to Margie.

About 18 months after meeting, Margie and Westerfield were married in Bennettsville, South Carolina. Terry was born a year later.

The couple had been married about four years when Westerfield was transferred to Germany. The family went with him, and Margie discovered around the same time that she was pregnant with their second child, Alan.

Three years later, Westerfield was transferred back to Fort Bragg. Shortly after that, the marriage ended.

Margie began life anew with her sons and resumed her relationship with Bock. The two eventually married.

It was short-lived, Thompson said, and Bock never established a relationship with his stepsons. Margie began spending more time at the NCO Club.

Years later, Thompson said, Bock was indifferent about the boys and their mother.

“It was clear he was devoid of any emotion in respect to those boys, and really, he was indifferent about Margie as well.”

•••

In 2000, Thompson and Mark Brewington, a State Bureau of Investigation agent on the cold case task force, visited Bock where he was living in Eleanor, West Virginia, a small town in a bend along the Kanawha River.

Bock was about 80 at the time. He didn’t welcome the investigators with open arms.

“He really and truly didn’t want to talk to us, but I think he was intrigued and wanting to know what we knew,” Thompson said. “He toyed with us, throwing old information and seeing where we would go with it or he’d go silent to see how much we actually knew.”

In 2012, Fayetteville police detective Mike Ballard and Thompson interviewed Bock again. This time they traveled to Tomah, Wisconsin, a small city about 50 miles east of the Mississippi River.

Bock showed no concern as to the fate of the brothers, the investigators said.

They noted, too, the one term that Bock used in talking about the Westerfields: “Them boys.”

Bock had referred to them the same way years earlier when he was interviewed by Thompson.

“In both interviews, and I chastised him in the first and second (interviews), did he ever call Alan and Terry by name,” he said. “It was ‘them boys.’ That’s all Bock would do to give them any credit as to who they were as young children was ‘them boys.’”

Ballard, having read the case file and interviewed Bock, made him an offer.

“I approached him with a possibility of a letter of qualified immunity, telling him all we are interested in is finding these boys,” Ballard said.

“He looked at us and said, ‘I was in the MPs (military police), and if I hadn’t been in the MPs, that would be a pretty good proposition.’”

Ballard took that to mean that Bock thought he was smarter than to accept such a deal.

They chatted a little more before Bock made a statement that Ballard believes incriminated himself.

“He said, ‘You know I was the last one to see them alive.’ In my line of work, pretty much that’s a confession,″ Ballard said.

Bock died in Tomah on May 9, 2016, at the age of 93. He never remarried. He was buried with military honors.

•••

Westerfield never stopped looking for his sons. He documented his efforts in a diary.

“He actively pursued leads on his own,” Thompson said. “He would go wherever a person would give him a clue. He consulted mediums and they would give him direction and he would pursue it.”

Margie remarried and lived much of the remainder of her life in Loris, South Carolina.

“I think ultimately, well, I know this to be true because she said so, she found herself responsible for those kids,” Thompson said. “The fact that she was never there at the house, that fact that she knew the boys were gone at 5:30 p.m. and chose to do what she normally did on a regular basis, which was going to the NCO Club.”

•••

If the boys were still alive, Terry would 65 and Alan would celebrate his 61st birthday this month.

Their disappearance remains classified as a missing persons case. Their photos are still found on missing persons websites. Some sites include age progression, indicating what they might look like as adults.

At one point, Thompson said, he and the Fayetteville Police Department’s forensics team searched the Madison Avenue house where the boys lived.

“We turned the underside of that house upside down and never found anything,” he said.

The three investigators say the evidence, all circumstantial, indicates Bock is responsible for the deaths. Other investigators from a multitude of agencies reached the same conclusion, Thompson said.

The case won’t be closed until remains are found or a confession can be substantiated, Fayetteville police detective Daniel Johnson said.

The youngest of the three investigators, he remains hopeful that if the bodies were buried on Fort Bragg, they’ll turn up, given the amount of construction around the reservation.

“I’m also optimistic there could be a witness or two who never said anything. For instance, Bock, after this, lived all over the world and the United States,” Johnson said. “Maybe someone out there will see your article and will say, ‘Hey, I had a conversation with this guy 15 years ago.’”

Over the years, Margie never gave up hope that her boys would be found.

In a 1994 interview with the Observer, she told a reporter that she liked to think her sons were still alive.

"There's always a part of you that wants to believe they are still alive, somewhere,″ she said. “I hope and pray that they will be found alive. But that's only a hope. Sometimes I don't think God will let me die without knowing what happened to my children.″

Margie died on Feb. 27, 2003, in Florence, South Carolina, at age 70.

The fate of her sons remains a mystery.

Staff writer Nancy McCleary can be reached at nmccleary@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3568.

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